December 01, 2010

Change. It's a good thing. Trust me.

So recently, I’ve been on this “I can do anything if I set my mind to it” streak. It began in high school when a few friends of mine decided to start break dancing. They weren’t break dancers to begin with. Rather, they were the ads and student life editors of the yearbook. However, one thing led to another and they decided they wanted to break dance. Armed with an arsenal of a few other friends and youtube, they learned, practiced, and ultimately, became break dancers. They’re both now part of dance crews back home in University of Southern California.

How does this apply to me? Well, over thanksgiving break I was browsing the web looking for some inspiration that I needed to update a website that I’ve been working on for the past 6 months. I stumbled upon (literally: www.stumbleupon.com check it out) this website that showed the top 10 flash websites (http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/best-flash-sites check this out too). I realized that this was exactly what I was looking for in a website. With that realization came the thought “How cool would it be if my website looked like that.” If you click on the website, you’ll realize how impossible it seems to make one of these websites when you have literally no experience with the program needed to make such websites (Adobe Flash). Yet, I remembered my friends and how they too were in my same position. Yet, they talked the daunting task before them with the help of a few friends and youtube. Why couldn’t I do the same? With that, I began my furious youtubing/free tutorialing/googling to be able to make this work. As far as progress is concerned, I have accumulated about 15 websites sitting in my bookmarks folder on my web browser waiting for December 15th (the day finals week ends) to be read, learned, and implemented. Am I excited? Definitely.

So basically, what I’m saying is that if you sent your mind to something, and you’re willing to work hard to achieve it, you will. Of course, it’s not going to be fast or easy, but learning something that you previously thought was impossible feels pretty good in the end.

With that being said: check out this article from psychology today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200210/the-10-rules-change. If you’re like me and have gained the freshmen 15, this should be a very motivational article to help implement lifestyle changes to (in my case) lose weight. It’s another one of those things that you can do if you just set your mind to it.